Woke Organizations Linked to WGA Not Doing Them Any Favors

An organization with close ties to the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) is pushing a woke agenda and working it into their demands to end the strike. Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE) has much overlap in membership with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), and at the end of July, the group organized an “intersectional picket.”

“Intersectional” is one of those newly embraced buzzwords that progressive academics have concocted to play up the identity politics that is ripping our society at the seams. In a discussion of the term, Professor Anne Sisson Runyan describes the layers of oppression in intersectionality with this example: “[W]omen of color actually experience a different form of racism from men of color, just as they experience a different form of sexism from white women. In this sense, gender is always “raced” and race is always gendered.”

People who check more minority boxes are more oppressed, and people who check fewer are more privileged. It is basically a scorecard of oppression created to push us into smaller groups that hate and resent the others.

It is no coincidence that TTIE pushes intersectionality in their mission statement. “As the only intersectional social change organization that advocates within the entertainment industry for a diverse cross-section of historically excluded communities, TTIE is uniquely situated to empower writers and transform the industry into one in which all writers and all stories can thrive,” their website reads.

TTIE is using this mission to wedge themselves into the writer’s strike and push their race-bating agenda and narrative. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Maha Chehlaoui, the program manager of TTIE, said to a crowd after the organized picketing, “When this is over, there is going to be a mad rush to staff up and make up for lost time. So please, remember to advocate for one another and keep building on the momentum of getting more of us into rooms, moving more historically excluded writers into positions of power in a moment where more and more of our communities are under attack, our stories are banned, our rights are being legislated away.”

Of course, these are lies that perpetuate victimhood and resentment and are not based in reality.

On their website, the organization also has several “Factsheets,” a comical misnomer to say the least. These “factsheets” detail the problems that TTIE claims Hollywood has in its representations of various races and categories of people, as well as the changes the organization wishes to see. However, these “factsheets” are full of inaccuracies and misleading information.

For example, one sheet entitled “Latinx People” includes a definition of the word “Latinx.” The sheet reads, “‘Latinx’ is a gender-neutral or non-binary alternative to ‘Latino/Latina/Latin American’ and is fast growing as the preferred identifier among U.S. Latin American communities.” It is true that the term is fast-growing among academics in America, but it is absolutely not preferred. In fact, it is to the dismay of Latin and Hispanic Americans that the term was coined at all. The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country, chose to ban the word from use in any formal correspondence. Domingo Garcia, president of the group, said, “The reality is there is very little to no support for its use and it’s sort of seen as something used inside the Beltway or in Ivy League tower settings.”

Another “factsheet” entitled “Migrants” is rife with inaccuracies. The sheet claims, “Immigrants are far less likely than the native-born population to commit crimes. Yet one-third of TV immigrant characters are linked to crime.” They cite the CATO Institute as the source of their information. However, in the linked article CATO admits that some of the findings they are reporting must be taken lightly due to the fact that the data comes from the US Census. “However, studies of immigrant criminality based on Census data alone could fail to give the full picture. First, many of the answers given to the Census may have been educated guesses from the Census workers and not the inmates. Second, the government has done a very poor job of gathering data on the nationality and immigration status of prisoners – even when it has tried,” the institute writes. TTIE conveniently overlooked and failed to report that caveat.

Furthermore, the information presented was based on studies from the early 2000s, but more recent data suggests that immigration, specifically illegal immigration, is correlated with an increase in crime. The Heritage Foundation reports, “A 2021 Department of Justice report revealed that 64% of federal arrests in 2018 involved noncitizens, despite them comprising only 7% of the population at that time.”

The same “factsheet” also claims that Asians represent the highest number of undocumented immigrants in America, not immigrants from Latin America. This is simply a flat-out lie. Even CNN who has been known to report false or misleading information shows that Latin Americans represent the highest numbers of undocumented immigrants. According to CNN, undocumented Asian immigrants total 9.42 million people, but undocumented Latin American immigrants total 14.51 million people, with almost 11 million of them coming from Mexico alone. That is a difference of over 5 million immigrants, meaning TTIE is basing their narrative off of a huge lie.

At the beginning of the writer’s strike, I wrote that Americans want to be entertained, not preached to. That has become evidenced by the failing shows and movies that have embraced woke and hyper-progressive stances. However, these are the same stances based on false information that organizations like TTIE want to push more of, which will in turn lead to more failure and loss of money for production companies. If the WGA has any hope of having their reasonable demands met, they should distance themselves from the very loud voices of people like TTIE.